View last month's issue Subscribe to this newsletter IN THIS ISSUE: SUFFERING FROM SHAREPOINT DEPLOYMENT FATIGUE? Transitioning customizations, services, and solutions from SharePoint development and staging environments through to production does not have to be a tedious, labor-intensive, and error-prone task. HAVE WEB CONTENT, WILL TRAVEL Do you have a home-grown HTTP website or portal that you want to migrate to SharePoint? Make the process seamless and pain-free with AvePoint's new Website Migrator. NEWS FROM AVEPOINT AvePoint is taking TechEd 2009 by storm, with a cutting-edge new booth, pioneering new product releases, and a Ducati Monster 696 giveaway! SIDE BAR: IN CASE YOU MISSED IT,  UPCOMING EVENTS, CUSTOMER CORNER  SUFFERING FROM SHAREPOINT DEPLOYMENT FATIGUE?   Does the act of propagating your front end customizations (such as site definitions, IIS Settings, and web.configs) from dev, through testing and staging environments, into production give you a migraine?   Does the prospect of deploying SharePoint Solutions and Design elements across your environment cause mental trauma?   Are you ready to automate these processes, reduce risk of manual-error and project delays, and deliver improved application reliability? If you answered yes to any of the above, you are ready to streamline the SharePoint deployment lifecycle. To do this, you need to leverage the right tools that will automate and optimize the distribution of front-end web server (WFE) components, SharePoint Solutions, and SharePoint Design elements throughout your deployment. Making the SharePoint Deployment Process Intelligent Effective management of release operations is vital to a successful SharePoint deployment. Without proper planning or control, errors or changes during the staging process can result in increased time-to-value, project delays, and poor application reliability. DocAve Deployment Manager meets these challenges with a pioneering solution that minimizes risk of human-error and cost overruns, accelerates service delivery, and facilitates pre-production operations for a successful SharePoint implementation. DocAve Deployment Manager - an independently deployable module within the DocAve Software Platform - lets administrators manage and streamline the various stages of the release process and efficiently provision the SharePoint platform for deployment. Propagating Front End Components Across Environments Although the SharePoint Solution framework is gaining in popularity, many customizations must still be deployed manually. These include features, site definitions, IIS settings, web.config, .NET assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache, and other file dependencies on the WFE file systems. These configurations and components reside on the SharePoint front-end servers and need to be promoted across different SharePoint farms to maintain consistency across staging environments. This could prove a lengthy and error-prone process, especially when dealing with multiple farms and many web front-end servers. DocAve Deployment Manager supports the replication of these front-end components across multiple environments, delivering automated one-to-many deployment of IIS settings, web.config, GAC assemblies, and additional files and folders. DocAve also lets administrators easily and quickly rollback any deployment changes, should they prove unacceptable or unwanted. Deploying SharePoint Solutions Microsoft's recommended approach to deploying SharePoint customizations is via the Solution framework.This framework provides a unified infrastructure through which to bundle all components into a unified, reusable package containing a set of web parts, features, site definitions, and assemblies that can be enabled or disabled independently. While vastly simplifying the customization packaging and deployment process, the proliferation of Solution packages contributes to customization drift and can lead to inconsistent behavior across SharePoint environments. DocAve Deployment Manager streamlines global Solution deployment and helps ensure consistency across all environments. Leveraging Deployment Manager, administrators can realize the following benefits: A global, holistic view of all SharePoint Solutions across multiple farms, including Solution status and versions A streamlined deployment of multiple Solution files to multiple destination farm instances Efficient execution of actions across multiple Solutions Centrally managed and deployed Solutions from a unified Solution repository DocAve Deployment Manager propagates SharePoint Solutions across farms, from a local file system, or from a centralized Solution store managed by DocAve. Promoting SharePoint Design Elements DocAve Deployment Manager empowers organizations to efficiently transition site-level design elements from one stage in the release process to the next. With DocAve, administrators and developers can generate faithful copies of custom elements - such as site columns, content types, site templates, and web part galleries - and manage these copies across various staging environments. With point-and-click ease and variable live-mode and stage-mode functionality, DocAve helps organizations maintain consistency across site-level design components, eliminates the need for manual design deployments, and reduces the provisioning activity required during each environment build out.  IN CASE YOU MISSED IT! New White Paper (Co-Authored with Microsoft): From Deployment to Production: Streamlining SharePoint Deployment with DocAve Deployment Manager Read White Paper, Visit our Website, or check out our White Paper Library  UPCOMING EVENTS AIIM International Expo + Conference Philadelphia, PA March 30-April 2, 2009 Best Practices for Managing SharePoint Content and Structure AvePoint and PointBridge Webinar March 31, 2009 European SharePoint Best Practices Conference London, UK April 6-8, 2009 SharePoint Summit 2009 Centre Mont-Royal, Montreal April 6-8, 2009 DocAve v5 Hands-On Lab Dallas, TX April 14, 2009 Rocky Mountain SharePoint Conference Salt Lake City, UT April 28, 2009 Decatec and AvePoint SharePoint Event Rome, Italy May 7, 2009 SharePoint Solutions Summit - UK Hayes, Middlesex May 7, 2009 Microsoft TechEd North America 2009 Los Angeles, CA May 11-15, 2009 View all upcoming events  CUSTOMER CORNER Latest Release Version: DocAve v5.1.1 Date: January 21, 2009 DocAve v5.1.1 introduced EMC Centera integration, end-user archiving, extranet replication, and many other potent enhancements All Release Notes For more information and to download a free, fully-enable trial of DocAve Deployment Manager, visit AvePoint's website. Be sure to read the latest White Paper on SharePoint Deployment Management, co-authored by AvePoint and Microsoft.  HAVE WEBSITE, WILL TRAVEL Are you looking to consolidate all of your web content management operations into MOSS? Are you wondering how to migrate your existing web content without having to deal with the tedious tasks of regenerating URL lists, copying and pasting HTML code, and manually correcting links? Well, your ship has arrived... AvePoint's Website Migrator streamlines and automates the web content migration process, providing a powerful and easy-to-use toolkit for mapping and transferring legacy web elements directly into MOSS. With Website Migrator, you can drastically reduce website migration costs, fully leverage and centralize your legacy web content, and avoid the error-prone and labor-intensive task of manually migrating web elements into SharePoint. The AvePoint Website Migrator lets you: Migrate any HTML and Java-scripted web content directly into MOSS Search and target elements by HTML tag path or class ID via an intuitive interface Associate SharePoint features including Top Link and Quick Launch Bar to transferred content, to capture full functionality of legacy elements Seamlessly transfer imbedded tables into SharePoint lists for an uninterrupted end-user experience Easily generate and save customized mapping schemas for fast migration of multiple pages and sites Efficiently manage and update all page links during the migration job Download websites to local offline stores for full testing prior to production environment migration Are you ready to consolidate your web content management into MOSS? Now is the time! To learn more about AvePoint powerful new Website Migrator, contact your AvePoint sales professional today.  NEWS FROM AVEPOINT AvePoint is Taking TechEd 2009 by Storm! This year's TechEd-North America is going to be quite an event. For starters, in response to comments from the community, Microsoft has consolidated festivities back into a single week. This should make for an action packed six-days! In honor of the big event, AvePoint is planning some major stuff! Here's a sneek peek at what AvePoint has in store for TechEd 2009: Pioneering new Product Releases! Stop by the booth to see demonstrations of AvePoint's new products, including solutions for eDiscovery, Reporting, SharePoint Anti-Virus, Compliance, and Website Migration! Giveaway of a 2009 DUCATI MONSTER 696! A sleek new booth with innovative, state-of-the-art displays! Be sure to stop by and visit AvePoint at BOOTH #553, and enter to win a new DUCATI MOTORCYCLE! See you there! Thank you for reading this newsletter! Should you wish to unsubscribe, please refer to the link at the bottom. Please let us know if there are any article topics you'd like us to cover by e-mailing your suggestions to marketing@avepoint.com. Sent by AvePoint, 3 Second Street, Jersey City, NJ 07311, 1-800-661-6588 ?2009 AvePoint, Inc. All rights reserved. DocAve, AvePoint, and the AvePoint logo are trademarks of AvePoint, Inc. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners.